Quotes About Literature

I hope people will like my novels after I'm dead. And I hope my children think about me in good ways, by and large.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked.

I love to write. I write everything across the board - kids' stories and novels and scripts. I actually would like to give that a go; I'd like to try to be a writer.

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.'

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Fantasy novels, I don't really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.

I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.

I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why 'Romeo and Juliet' came to such a pass.

I plan to live to be 98, so I'll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

I'm a writer, so I like nuances.

There are people who are good for letters and others that are good for numbers.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.